Please note that not ONCE in this entire video are the phrases “old fashioned” or “dying art” mentioned. This is why I think that it’s SO important for us conservators to speak up and tell our stories ourselves, and to talk to the public about our work.

HUZZAH! It is National Library Week, bookworms and library cats!!

And that means it is the perfect time of year to show some love to your local (and not local) Libraries, both in person and online. So, just as we took time to make a special post on Follow a Library Day last year, we’ve created ANOTHER master post to honor all the libraries we know so far on tumblr so that you can #followalibrary!!

Check out their tumblrs below and show them some love, bookworms!(Alphabetical by url)

Whew! There’s a LOT of you. :) But we now this list is just getting started! Feel free to keep the library love going by adding any libraries we missed/don’t know of yet! (And if you’re not following US already, well, what better time to start than this week? ;) Eh? Eh?) And, of course, never hesitate to visit your Library in person. We love seeing you! :)

You live in Maryland right? I live here and I love architecture and there are some buildings that are more on the modern side (some libraries + airports are really nice) but I feel like 80% of Maryland is just old red brick and it just a bit depressing tbh

Actually I am in Northern Virginia but the same comment applies to this area. We live in a fairly traditional area of the country in terms of architecture, anchored by the Neoclassical architecture of the federal buildings in the District. If you want to blame someone for the red brick with white trim architecture blame Thomas Jefferson, some of his projects included below.

This may be a weird question, but what was Madison's relationship/thoughts on Washington?

The strongest argument for ratifying the constitution was the approval of George Washington, signaled by his presence at the convention and his support afterward. James Madison understood that Washington was the “heavy weight champion” (Brookhiser 7) of American public life, which is why he stuck to him from the planned stages of the convention through the early days of Washington’s presidency.

The revolutionary war thrust Madison together with George Washington who was the commander in cheif for the continental army at the time. Washington was nineteen years Madison’s senior and at first he could only serve him from afar as an admirer. In 1778, the Governor’s council, noting “the great fatigues” to which Washington was exposed, decided to send him “a stock of good rum, wine [and] sugar.” Two years later, a congressional committee Madison sat on sent Washington a dozen boxes of lemons and two casks of wine. “As for our illustrious general,” Madison wrote, “the rich Madeira should flow in copious streams.”

The two finally met in person in the winter of 1781-1782 (Brookhiser 31), when the commander in chief came to Philadelphia to plan the war’s end with congress. In Madison, Washington found “devotion, hard work and (in time) good advice. The younger man provided a gift which he revealed man years later in a discussion of Washington, “The story so often repeated of [Washington] never laughing,” Madison told, “is wholly untrue; no man seemed to enjoy gay conversation, through he took little part in it himself. He was particularly pleased with the jokes, good humor and hilarity of his companions.”

“Madison’s filial admiration for Washington was what almost any revolutionary, especially of his generation, would feel. But Madison would have more opportunities than most to serve his idol”

In November 1784, Washington went to Richmond to lobby the assembly for improvements to the Potomac. A bill was also introduced by Joseph Jones but after Jones left the legislature to take a seat on the Governor’s council, Madison took over management of a bill supported by Washington. Washington supplied the prestige and persuasion while Madison got the legislative work done. “Your own judgment in this business will be the best guide,” Washington acknowledged in a letter to his “partner”. As a result, the Potomac River Company was chartered in the spring of 1785, with Washington as president.

Madison’s first visit to Mount Vernon followed in the fall (Brookhiser 45). After he left, Washington extended an open-ended invitation to further collaboration: “if anything should occur that is interesting, and you leisure will permit it, I should be glad to hear from you on the subject.” He sighed his letters with “affectionately. At Madison’s urging the assembly had given Washington fifty shares in the Potomac River Comany, valued at more than $22,000. Madison drafted a letter for him, asking the assembly to give the profits of his shares to charity. This would not be the last time Madison would be the General’s “ghost-writer”.

As one of Virginia’s representatives in Annapolis, Madison had called for a convention in Philadelphia. As a member of Virginia Assembly in Richmond, he wrote a bill to approve the recommendation he had made. With Madison’s input, the assembly picked a slate for Philadelphia that included Edmund Randolph, Patrick Henry, George Mason, Madison himself and George Washington headed this list. Henry refused and Washington did not want to go either. Madison spent all that winter and spring “wooing” him. When he wrote Washington in December 1786 to tell him that he was on the list of delegates, he underplayed his own role in putting Washington on there. “It was the opinion of every judicious friend whom I consulted that you name could not be spared… In these sentiments, I own I fully concurred.” On his way back on congress in December 1787, he stopped at Mount Vernon to speak with Washington. Madison would also provide Washington with updates as to what exactly was occurring in the congress chamber.

George Washington took the oath of office in New York City on April 30th, 1789. Madison left no description of the day but he had stopped at Mount Vernon on his way back to New York in late February to help Washington write his inaugeral address. Madison wrote a more wieldy version, in six paragraphs. After Washington got the speech in the Federal Hall, Madison wrote the House’s response and Washington’s answer to the House’s response.

Whenever Washington’s abilities were questioned in the House, Madison came to the defense of him. When Washington asked Thomas Jefferson to be Secretary of State and he refused the first time, Madison was to play “matchmaker” and floated the offer back to Jefferson who finally agreed in February 1790. Despite James Madison’s disapproval with Bank Bill in February 1791, Washington had not yet during his presidency exercised his veto power. Washington talked the Bank Bill over with Madison, “listening favorably as I thought to my views,” and asked Madison to prepared a veto message.

1792, Madison’s new political party named itself the Democratic-Republicans, but Madison’s most urgent task went far beyond politics: it was to persuade George Washington to stay in office for a second term as President of the United States. In the Spring the Commander-in-Chief asked his advisor how to let the country know that he would retire at the end of his term. Madison offered his opinions on the proper time for such an announcement (mid-September) and the proper manner (an article in the newspapers), and drafted an eight-paragraph Farewell Address. But he included a plea, “Having thus, Sir, complied with your wishes…I must now gratify my own by hoping [that you will make] one more sacrifice, severe as it may be, to the desires and interests of your country.”

Washington seemed above this. Madison “cherished Washington and his own closeness to him, could not acknowledge how much closer Washington had become with his former staff [Alexander Hamilton],” (Brookhiser 110). Washington subsequently decided to stay on at the urging of others such as Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. By 1793, Madison’s secret endorsement was for Philip Freneau. Freneau was a Princeton friend from their college days who published a newspaper openly attacking Washington and others of the rising Federalist party and sentiment. Jefferson and Madison distributed the papers.

With the Whiskey Rebellion underway, Washington called up the militia of 15,000 led by Alexander Hamilton. This passed without protest from Madison but aspects of the affair worried his nevertheless: “a standing army was necessary for enforcing laws.” Madison worried less about the attack on western Pennsylvania than an attack on public opinion by George Washington. Washington believed that the crisis had been stirred up by the Democratic Societies. Edmund Randolph wrote to Washington that a Democratic Society in South Carolina had named itself “Madisonian.” This, Washington had not liked at all. He was attempting to uphold the law, while Madison was “consorting with its enemies.” (Brookhiser 120). Washington and Madison had disagreed on many things over the past four years, but now Washington began to suspect that his old friend was growing against him.

In 1794, Aaron Burr introduced the bachelor Madison to Dolley Payne Todd whom he soon married. This courtship was encouraged by George and Martha Washington (Brookhiser 121). By April 1796, Madison began to take on Washington directly and his unhappiness showed. Despite their recent political disputes, he and Washington and still maintained somewhat of a friendship. He had supplied with his Madeira, helped with him canals and constitution-making; Washington had even blessed his marriage. Madison reminded the president that he was not a “king”, that the government had not “hereditary prerogatives and reminded him of the power of public opinion. Yet Madison admitted Washington’s “high authority” and insisted that he himself used only “decent terms” to refute it. Madison divided mind weakened his argument. Washington found it easy to reject the younger man’s opposition. He ended the relationship. Though Madison would attend a few state dinners at the presidential mansion, he and Washington exchanged no more letters, paid no more visits. Madison’s own side was unhappy with him too. They blamed him for not fighting Washington “enough”.

In his Farewell Address, Washington followed the advice Madison had given to him four years earlier about how to “set the stage.” George Washington died on December 14th and Madison moved that the assembly wear mourning throughout their session. “Death,” he said, “has robbed our country of its most distinguished ornament, and the world of one of its greatest benefactors.” Madison had never fully accepted the estrangement to Washington and stayed rather loyal till the end. In 1818, many years later when establishing the University of Virginia, one of the texts Madison added to library was Washington’s first inaugural and his Farewell Address.

Hi! I really enjoy reading all your theories. It's been a while since I read Snicket's other books, and I'm afraid it's hard to piece together the mystery of his "death". Like how the daily punctilio was led to believe he died and how he was on the run for years after. Did he fake his death as a tactic to avoid Olaf and V.F.D's other evil members?

Hi, @babies-breth! To be honest the issue of Lemony’s fake death is kind of a mess. We know of at least three times when Lemony was mistakenly reported dead.

When she was pregnant with Violet, Beatrice considered naming her “Lemony”. Considering that the Baudelaire family always names its children after dead people, this indicates that somehow she thought Lemony had passed away, fifteen years before “The Bad Beginning”. He did try to send her a telegram for Violet’s birth, however (according to “The Beatrice Letters”) so she possibly realized her mistakes a few months after that.

In “The End”, Kit Snicket mentions losing both her brothers.

In the un-Authorized Autobiography, the authorities eventually reports Lemony despite a lack of evidence for it, and Lemony attends his own funeral. The entire arrangement seems to have been a ploy to transport a mysterious object inside the empty coffin, and to photograph Lemony in a public place.

All in all Lemony is a very mysterious figure, even in the context of his own universe. It wouldn’t be out-of-character for him to have been reported dead multiple times, with multiple retractions after the fact. We all know how little journalistic integrity The Daily Punctillo really has.

James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.[Mark Twain, Papers of Mark Twain, Accession #6314, etc., Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va., in Box 1]

Did Lemony fake his own death to escape the authorities and his enemies? It’s entirely possible.

The University of Virginia Library is pleased to announce Phase II of the Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) Cooperative program. The University of Virginia Library is collaborating with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, and 27 other Cooperative members. This second and final phase of establishing the Cooperative (2017-2019) is generously funded by a $750,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University of Virginia.

Phase II expands the number of cooperative partners from 17 to 29 members, and now includes two international archives, a U.S. state archive, two documentary editing projects, an individual scholar, and several new academic research libraries. During this new phase, SNAC will welcome additional members as the cooperative builds the capacity to ingest new sets of data and train editors.

Phase II has both social and technological objectives. The social objectives include developing a business model that will ensure long term sustainability, further developing editorial policies and standards, and being able to offer three forms of training for editors: on-site and remote as well as online self-guided. There will be many technological objectives, but chief among them will be the following: developing cooperative ingest tools that will enable data contributing institution to collaborate in refining and ingesting data into SNAC, and in return to receive persistent identifiers to enhance their descriptive data; refining and enhancing the History Research Tool for researchers; completing development of the key components of the technical infrastructure; and performing computational refinement and enrichment of existing SNAC data. A major focus will be on expanding capacity in training editors and ingesting new batches of data. Progress in these two areas will enable the Cooperative to vastly expand membership and the global social-document network represented in SNAC.

The SNAC Cooperative aspires to improve the economy and quality of archival processing and description, and at the same time, to address the longstanding research challenge of discovering, locating, and using distributed historical records. SNAC began as a research and development project in 2010 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project demonstrated the feasibility of separating the description of persons, families, and organizations – including their socio-historical contexts – from the description of the historical resources that are the primary evidence of their lives and work. SNAC also demonstrated that the biographical-historical data extracted and assembled can be used to provide researchers with convenient, integrated access to historical collections held by archives and libraries, large and small, around the world.

Initial work made it clear that the potential power of the assembled data to transform research and improve the economy and effectiveness of archival descriptive practices required more than digital tools.

SNAC governance and administration is now moving to the University of Virginia Library, which will provide it a long-term organizational home that ensures close collaborations and partnerships within the cultural heritage and research communities.

As its primary cooperative role, NARA has taken the lead in development and execution of SNAC’s formal training program called SNACSchool. NARA’s SNAC Liaisons are active members of the SNACSchool Working Group along with SNAC partners from other SNAC partner institutions including Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art; George Washington University Library; New York Public Library; and University of Miami Library. The working group formed in late 2016 with the primary mission of developing a formal training program for SNAC. The current curriculum includes modules for basic archival name authority control, searching the SNAC database, and creating and editing data in SNAC. SNACSchool is also designed to take place anywhere and anytime: most sessions are conducted remotely. And in Phase II, the working group is aiming for online tutorials for Cooperative members.

Jerry Simmons, National Archives Liaison to SNAC, welcomes attendees at the SNAC Partners Meeting in the Innovation Hub in Washington, DC

NARA staff is also responsible for SNAC’s social media presence. Currently found on twitter be sure to follow @SNACcooperative for all the latest information about SNAC and to learn helpful tips on using it.